Review Summary: soft blue rain/blemished red rust
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I’m always impressed when an album cover’s colors so accurately portray the music that lives within the sleeve. Chilean producer Kamixlo has chosen a faded blue and white portrait to represent his 6-song EP
Angelico and it couldn’t be a more appropriate tonal palette. The sample-laden effort is centered around the human voice, although modulated and obscured, making the glowing face all the more fitting. Yet, this feat is only impressive to an extent, as many of the critical faults within the effort embody the artwork’s colors and themes. While the electronica beats are certainly bright and metallic, the repetitive glitchiness rubs the alloy ever-so-slightly, which is enough to produce a tinge of rust on the otherwise stainless steel. Even though Kamixlo is attempting a fresh take on the glitch-trap genre, it somehow feels heavily borrowed and outdated. ‘Ice2CU’ features a scratched-out, glittering voice as its main motif which does conjure up images of a frozen machine defecting due to the cold tundra it is stuck within. However, its artificial death ends up being a trite effort due to the same error popping up on the computer’s screen:
ERROR_404_SOFTWARE_NOT_FOUND.
This isn’t to discredit the producer, however, as he has set up all the necessary tools and coding to keep this robot alive and listenable. The production and mixing ends up being the most impressive part of this venture, a cold and ringing effort that utilizes abstract noises of commonplace objects much like Autechre’s
Confield. Really, it ends up being the AI’s awkward transition into the modernized realm of melodic electronica that defects the beautifully built system. Simply, the melodies are not alluring enough to be catchy yet not strange enough to be excused as artistic attempts to ~push the boundaries~. The same can be said for the dynamics; a steady, straight line that slightly hops up and down only when another icy layer makes its way into the beat. All of these viruses prove to be too much for the paranoid android, making the death itself an inevitable occurrence. In the end, this is just another innovation that is two years behind on the current state of technological advances; another metal gadget left to rust in the junkyard of failed inventions.
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